Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

People had different opinions as to whether Barbara was homely or only plain. Her two most noticeable defects were her wide, meaty-looking lips and her stringy black hair that was always dotted with enormous flakes of dandruff. Perhaps with good clothes and beauty parlors she might have passed muster, but lacking such assists there wasn’t much she could do. Also, it didn’t help that she was six months pregnant. None of which stood in the way of her having as much sex as she liked. Sex at Spirit Lake was a seller’s market.

Officially the prisoners weren’t supposed to have sex at all, except when spouses came to visit, but the monitors who watched them over the closed-circuit tv would usually let it pass so long as it didn’t look like a rape. There was even a corner in one of the dorms screened off with newspapers, like a Japanese house, where you could go to fuck in relative privacy. Most women charged two Big Macs or the equivalent, though there was one black girl, a cripple, who gave blow jobs for free. Daniel watched the couples going in back of the paper screen and listened to them with a kind of haunted feeling in his chest. He thought about it more than he wanted to, but he abstained. Partly from prudential reasons, since a lot of the prisoners, men and women both, had a kind of venereal warts for which there didn’t seem to be a cure, but also partly (as he explained to Barbara) because he wanted to wait till he was in love. Barbara was quite cynical on the subject of love, having suffered more than her share in that area, but Daniel liked to think she secretly approved of his idealism.

She wasn’t cynical about everything. At times, indeed, she could outdo Daniel in the matter of principles, the most amazing of which was her latest idea that everyone always got exactly what he or she deserved. At Spirit Lake this was on a par with praising steak to vegetarians, since just about everyone, including Daniel, felt he’d been railroaded. They might or might not believe in justice in an abstract sense, but they certainly didn’t think justice had anything to do with the legal system of the State of Iowa.

“I mean,” Daniel insisted earnestly, “what about my being here? Where is the justice in that?”

Only a few days before he’d told her the complete story of how, and why, he’d been sent up (hoping all the while that the monitors, off in their offices, were tuned in), and Barbara had agreed then it was a travesty. She’d even offered a theory that the world was arranged so that simply to exist you had to be violating some law or other. That way the higher-ups always had some pretext for pouncing when they wanted you.

“The justice of your being here isn’t for what you did , dumbbell. It’s for what you didn’t do. You didn’t follow your own inner promptings. That was your big mistake. That’s what you’re here for.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bull- shit ,” she replied coolly, turning the inflection around against him. “Purity of heart is to will one thing. You ever heard that saying?”

“A stitch in time saves nine. Won’t that do as well?”

“Think about it. When you went to Minneapolis with that friend of yours, then you were doing the right thing, following the spirit where it led. But when you came back you did the wrong thing.”

“For Christ’s sake, I was fourteen.”

“Your friend didn’t go back to Iowa. How old was he?”

“Fifteen.”

“In any case, Daniel, age has nothing to do with anything. It’s the excuse people use till they’re old enough to acquire better excuses — a wife, or children, or a job. There are always going to be excuses if you look for them.”

“Then what’s yours?”

“The commonest in the world. I got greedy. I was pulling in money hand over fist, and so I stayed on in a hick town long after I should have left. I didn’t like it there, and it didn’t like me.”

“You think it’s fair you should be sent to prison for that, for going after the money? Cause you did say, the other day, that you didn’t think doing the abortions was in any way wrong.”

“It was the first time I ever sinned against my own deepest feelings, and also the first time I’ve been to prison.”

“So? It could be a coincidence, couldn’t it? I mean, if there were a tornado tomorrow, or you were struck by lightning, would that also be something you deserved? ”

“No. And that’s how I know there won’t be a tornado. Or the other thing.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, and smiled. Because of her pregnancy her teeth were in terrible condition. She got supplements, but apparently not enough. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to lose all of them. At twenty-seven years of age. It didn’t seem fair.

There were a couple weeks in the middle of October when the pace slackened. There wasn’t enough work left on the farms to make it worth the gasoline to drive to Spirit Lake and get a crew. Daniel wondered if the prisoners were really as glad to be lazing about the compound as they said. Without work the days stretched out into Saharas of emptiness, with the certainty of something much worse waiting up ahead.

When the new winter rosters were made up, Daniel found himself assigned to Consolidated Food systems nearby “Experimental Station 78,” which was not, in fact, all that experimental, having been in production steadily for twenty years. The company’s P.R. department had simply never found a more attractive way to describe this side of the business, which was the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite that was used as a supplement in various extended meat and cheese products. The bugs bred at Station 78 in all their billions, were almost as economical a source of protein as soybeans, since they could be grown in the labyrinthine underground bunkers to quite remarkable sizes with no other food source than a black sludge-like paste produced for next to nothing by various urban sanitation departments. The termites’ ordinary life-cycle had been simplified and adapted to assembly-line techniques, which were automated so that, unless there was a breakdown, workers weren’t obliged to go into the actual tunnels. Daniel’s job at the station was to tend a row of four-kiloliter vats in which the bugs were cooked and mixed with various chemicals, in the course of which they changed from a lumpy dark-gray mulch to a smooth batter the color of orange juice. In either condition it was still toxic, so as to protein there was no dividend working here. However, the job was considered something of a plum, since it involved very little real work and the temperature down in the station was an invariable 83°F. For eight hours a day you were guaranteed a level of warmth and well-being that was actually illegal in some parts of the country.

Even so, Daniel wished he’d been posted to any other job. He’d never had any qualms before about extended foods, and there was little resemblance between what he could imagine back in the tunnels and what he could see in the vats, but despite that he couldn’t get over a constant queasiness. Sometimes a live termite, or a whole little swarm of them, would manage to make it past the mashers and into the area where Daniel worked, and each time it was as though a switch had been thrown that turned reality into nightmare. None of the other prisoners were so squeamish, it was irrational, but he couldn’t help it. He would have to go after the loose bugs, to keep them from getting into the batter in the vats. They were blind and their wings were not suited to sustained flight, which made them easy to swat but also more sinister somehow, the way they caromed and collided into each other. There was nothing they could do and nowhere they could go, since they couldn’t reproduce sexually and there was nothing outside the station’s tunnels they could digest. Their only purpose in life was to grow to a certain size and then be pulped — and they’d evaded that purpose. To Daniel it seemed that the same thing had happened to him.